Ow! (Av!)

We were lucky enough to be able to pick Molli Malou up from vuggestue together today. We hadn’t made a joint pick-up in a while, so we kind of enjoyed hanging out and watching Molli Malou run around the playground endangering herself and every mortal thing with which she came in contact.

There’s a big slide at the playground… about nine or ten kid-sized steps up, then a (walled) platform, then a slide. It’s about four feet off the ground at the top. The teachers have told us that they don’t let Molli climb or play with the slide because she doesn’t quite “get it” yet. Understandable, since she only just learned to go down stairs by crawling backwards a few days ago. Prior to that, her instinct was to try walking down like mor and daddy.

(And incidentally, if the headline of “ow” and the description of a big slide and a girl with no sliding skills makes you think you know where this is headed, you’re wrong. Sort of.)

Anyway, she’s gotten very good at going up steps, and she’s proved capable of sliding down slides backwards and on her belly if a parent is on hand. So when she went ambling up the stairs to the slide in my presence, I figured I’d follow her and see if I couldn’t teach her how the slide “worked:” walk up, lower self backwards and stomach down onto the slide, and glide on down.

So I went up behind her and stopped her from making a kamikaze dive down the slide. Trine stood next to the slide and guided her down gently once I’d gotten her into position. She enjoyed it, and ran straight around to the stairs to do it again. This time Trine only had to keep a hand near her as she slid down. And once again Molli ran around, up the stairs, let me position her—and slid down without any guidance from Trine at all!

This trick was repeated several more times, and by the end she was even turning herself around and getting into position at the top of the slide by herself.

Trine and I were awed at how quickly she’d learned this new skill. I think we were smiling at one another with pride—me on the elevated slide platform, Trine down by the base of the slide—as Molli scrambled back for one more climb up the stairs and rush down the slide. But suddenly I noticed Trine reacting to something and rushing over to a spot a few feet away from the base of the stairs to the slide. At the same time I caught the sound of Molli wailing hysterically.

After seven or eight trips up a narrow stair case and down a steep (for her) four-foot slide with nary a bump, Molli had tripped over her own two feet and stumbled into something—the wooden stumps that border the sandy play area in which the slide was located? The asphalt of the path she’d been ambling along? Who knows?

We only know she gave herself a massive welt on her forehead, huge scrapes on her nose and upper lip, and was very, very upset.

Okay, strike one of those “verys”: she actually calmed down surprisingly quickly. I think she got over it quicker than we did. She was done crying in about 3-4 minutes; my heart was still racing ten minutes later.

It was her first big ow, and it happened in the presence of her mother, her father, the entire pedagogical staff of her daycare center, and a handful of other parents. And there was nothing any of us could have done to prevent it.

And I’m supposed to let her go play on her own when?

Anyway, she was very happy this evening at home, but I thought her defeated prizefighter look was worth sharing. The purple welt on her forehead is actually raised about two millimiters above the surface of the surrounding forehead:

The preceding shot doesn’t quite do justice to her nose… you need a little distance to see just how red it is (she kind of reminds me of thee Guy With the Big Red Nose who ran the bowling alley in Marblehead).

She’s still saying “goo’ guh!” (“good girl!”) when she thinks she deserves praise, and today introduced her first attempts at English language plurals (we think): instead of just “cat!” she actually tried saying “cats!” a few times. It came out “catsssss-th-th-thhhhhh.” I’ve got it on video and I’ll post it soon enough…

But I’ve already used up more free time than I actually have, so good night.